[incubation] Fast releasing projects

["Gorkem Ercan" <gorkem.ercan@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,
I would like to raise questions around why some of the eclipse projects 
become “permanent incubators” although
they are not permanent incubators as defined [1].

Eclipse Che project, as established as it is, is an incubator project. 
It recently had its 6.0 release.
However Che never came out of incubation because the project wanted to 
continue using some of the advantages
that incubator projects enjoy like reduced IP clearance.

One of our problems with the IP process is we follow a 3 week release 
cadence with Che. That means that every 3 weeks
a new version of Che is released (6.3.0 was released today and 6.4.0 
will be in 3 weeks) [4]
However when we need to introduce a new dependency as part of the 
release we can not really do that in every 3 weeks because
a project is not allowed to do a release without all CQs approved.

So this creates the situation that due to parallel IP process we get an 
approval for check-in but we can not really checkin
because our cadence is quicker than the CQ process. You can see 2 
ongoing examples of the situation in [2][3]. Unfortunately
these are not isolated cases basically the speed of CQ process mandates 
the speed we can bring some of the features.
Is there any advice on how we can do CQs on a quick release cadence?

Another issue we face with quick cadences is the release reviews. 
According to project handbook [5] a project should do
a release review for all Major and Minor releases [1]. (IMHO it is wrong 
to assume a project will follow major.minor.service versioning
but that is a different matter). That requires the Che leads to submit a 
review every 3 weeks and I am not
sure if this is really creating much value. Is there a way to completely 
automate or give an option to time box the reviews to be
quarterly?



[1] https://www.eclipse.org/projects/dev_process/#4_9_Incubators
[2] https://dev.eclipse.org/ipzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=15799
[3] https://dev.eclipse.org/ipzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=15288
[4] https://hub.docker.com/r/eclipse/che-server/tags/
[5] https://www.eclipse.org/projects/handbook/#release

Thanks,
Gorkem